


Galahad Redux

by aetas_obscura (aetataureate)



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Age Difference, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-04
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-16 21:27:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29831136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aetataureate/pseuds/aetas_obscura
Summary: "You’d have done rather well in a perverse Camelot, I’ve always believed. There’s something of a knightly devotion about you, and you have an anachronistic amount of experience at killing people with swords.”
Relationships: James Bond/M
Comments: 3
Kudos: 6





	Galahad Redux

When M returns, James is waiting on the balcony, one of the doors cracked, curtains shifting in the breeze. She knows it’s him right away—he hears her slip off her shoes near the entryway and pad over in her stockings. It must be a pair on its way out—in twenty years, he’s never known her to mistreat good clothes. He has drinks waiting on the low table, and she picks up the Jack and leaves him the Macallan, because she is a woman meant never to be understood, only observed and contemplated.

“This doesn’t absolve you of any trouble, you know,” she says, taking a conservative pull and sitting herself in the straight-backed chair, legs crossed at the ankles. “In fact, if you’ve convinced Villiers to give up this location, you’ve caused rather more trouble for me.”

“Be kind to Villiers, he’s got a delicate nature,” James says, taking a rather longer pull.

“If he’s compromised this, my eighth safehouse of the fiscal quarter, he can take his delicate nature and put it to better use assistant teaching a primary school class.”

James shrugs. M’s assistants never last long anyways. “I’m not here to absolve myself. Something different.”

“What is it, then?”

“I love you.”

M takes another sip. “Yes, I know. You’d have done rather well in a perverse Camelot, I’ve always believed. There’s something of a knightly devotion about you, and you have an anachronistic amount of experience at killing people with swords.”

“No, I mean, I love you.”

M pauses. She recrosses her legs, still at the ankles, the other direction. “What, as a man to a woman?”

“Yes, that exactly.”

“Don’t be absurd,” M concludes, returning to her whiskey at that same measured pace. James considers her. She’s in a good mood tonight, or at least too tired to bother removing him from her presence.

“I’m not being absurd.”

“Absurd, and a masochist, and your file will bear me out on that,” M says, like it’s a done deal. James gives up the pretense of good grace and downs his whiskey. “Oh, don’t pretend to be put out with me. I’m older than your mother was, it’s simply that none of the Brazilian beach volleyball players waiting in your hotel room bother to be disappointed in you.”

“I’m older than my mother was,” James says, “and I haven’t had sex outside the job in over three years.”

This time, there is a long pause. “That’s a shame,” M says eventually. “For a man like you, your age— that’s a shame. There is— double-oh’s rarely— but there is counseling for that sort of—”

James is shaking his head well before the word ‘counseling’ leaves her mouth. “It’s not that,” he says, then repeats, “ _counseling_ ,” appalled. He’s thrown her if she’s brought that up, and it’s a strange feeling.

“What, then?”

“I just,” James begins, his thoughts formless in the air around him. It’s there in the way nights are still warm in this part of the world, the skies clear, insects humming but failing to intrude upon their little bubble. “I love you, and I want you. Do you want me?”

“I’m seventy-four years old, James,” she tells him, not entirely crisply. “It’s difficult for you to imagine the amount of wanting I don’t do.”

“Do you want to have me, then?” he insists.

She looks at him for a long moment, through to his core and past it in her usual way. Then, so fast he nearly misses it, her eyes flick down, then away to the jungle around them. “Good night, Mr. Bond,” she says. He stands up, gathering his glass and the bottles to return to the kitchen. “Oh, leave it,” she says, and as he departs he hears glass clinking faintly.

The next day, James is in northern Finland and M has withdrawn to parts unknown. In all, it would have been an easy rejection had it not been followed up with Villiers, he who checks the security system, saying, “That’s difficult, Mr. Bond, a tremendously difficult go of it,” and then asking if he’s really being fired for doing 007 a favor.


End file.
